iPad and iPhone sync

Outside of Educational environments, iPad and iPhone are intended to be single-user devices. Unlike other computers with which you may be familiar, that support multiple user profiles, iOS/iPadOS devices are not intended to be shared.

You should each have your own AppleID - as using a shared AppleID has implications for privacy and unintentional data sharing. There are many good reasons to keep your digital identities entirely separate.

Should you wish to do so, you can continue to share Apps, Services, Purchases and Subscriptions using the Family Sharing features.

Family Sharing - Apple

What is Family Sharing? – Apple Support

Set up Family Sharing – Apple Support

Share App Store, iTunes Store and Apple Books purchases with Family Sharing – Apple Support

Sharing an AppleID between users is a very bad idea. Sooner or later, you’re going to encounter data loss, account lockout or compromise of sensitive data.

Your iPad and iPhone are different devices. Many types of data will synchronise between devices that are signed-in to iCloud with the same AppleID - but the devices are otherwise independent with potentially different installed Apps.

Home screen layout will differ between devices, if only due to the different aspect ratio of their screens. You can however, manually arrange the layout to be similar between devices.

Maintaining separation between AppleIDs is important if you are to avoid unintended “merging” of sensitive data. Whilst you may have no “secrets” between you, it is very probable that you will each have separate accounts and log-in credentials for various services - including email and websites.

As you are likely to be using Apple Keychain to mange your account passwords, sharing an AppleID or iOS/iPadOS device risks merging and overwriting of account credentials in Keychain - and this unintended merge will be propagated to other devices via iCloud. This arrangement almost always, at some point in time, will lead to lost credentials or data.